Chapter 1 The Cut on the Forearm

The band on Ryam Pellam's left forearm was cut short enough to cover with two fingers. He had been born with it that way, and that was the whole account of it the south ward had ever offered him. A brass band sealed to the skin of a child's arm at the swilling house, carrying the number of hours the city intended to credit him for an entire life, cut into it in green-black numerals. Boys off the north slopes came out holding six thousand, seven thousand, eight. Children of the Coalstairs came out holding whatever they came out holding, and the clerk who stamped them read the number aloud in the yard so that anybody standing there with an appetite could hear what the ward was worth that week. Ryam had come out at three thousand nine hundred. The clerk had written LOW in the box beside the figure and said the word out loud, in a voice with no shame in it at all. Somebody in the yard laughed. Ryam was four years old and did not understand the joke. He understood it later, at eleven, standing in the same yard in different trousers. He was nineteen now, and the band read two thousand eight hundred and sixty. Coal came up the chute at the Ropewalk yard four hours a day and went down to the flats, and what the ward paid a prentice for a day's shovelling was eleven hours against the eleven hours it cost to eat and keep a roof. There was no margin anywhere in the arithmetic. You worked your hours out, and your hours went to your mother, and what was left of you was whatever you were willing to do without. His mother was called Wenna and she had been in the back room off Cinderbell Row since the autumn before, with the cough that settled in her chest and stayed there like a tenant. The ward physician came on a Thursday and took nine hours a week for the coming to, plus nine more for what he put in her chest. Coal for her corner came to four. Ryam had done the sum so many times that he could do it in the dark, and it came to the same answer: if he advanced, the advance would be paid out of the band, and if he did not advance, he would keep the band and keep standing in a chute until his arms gave out. Then on the ninth day of Coalmoot, the summons came. Coll Tumm found him at the chute end during the noon break, breathing the coal dust and holding his water skin like a bladder. "They've posted the list," Coll said. "You're on it." "What list?" Coll pulled a pink slip from inside his shirt. The Hourhouse used pink carbon for anything a citizen was meant to keep, because pink showed the smudge of a thumb and a thumb had been in the citizen's pocket. "It says south-ward prentices are to present for advancement at the Hourhouse before the quarter turns. Nine names. You're fourth." "How much for me?" Coll looked at him. He was fifteen and he had not yet learned to arrange his face. "One third," he said. "Of what you were born with." One third of three thousand nine hundred. Ryam did not have to work it. One thousand three hundred hours, which was a hundred and nineteen days of eleven-hour days, which was a season of his mother's physician plus his own food plus coal and rent and everything else the ward kept coming for. The number sat in him where the band was. "You haven't got that either," Coll said. "No." "Mine is eight hundred." Coll folded the pink slip in half, then in half again. "If I go, I'll be a journeyman with under two hundred on me. If I don't go, I'm a prentice for ever at eleven a day." "For ever is a long time at eleven a day." Coll said nothing to that, which was how Ryam knew he had said the true thing. The old man came through the yard gate while they were still standing there. Osred Corbett collected the ward's hours the way a man collects rents: door to door, with a book, with a scale, with a knife he did not use on people so much as on paper. He had a grey band gone green with age and a limp that came and went with the weather, and Ryam had watched him do this same walk for as long as he could remember. "Fourth on the list is Pellam," Corbett said, without preamble. "Yes." "You'll go." "I'll go." Corbett wrote something in the book. He never looked pleased and never looked cruel, which Ryam's mother said was the face of a man who had made peace with a bad arrangement. "Mind what you sign," the old man said. "They read it twice in there and once out loud." Then he was gone, down the lane, and Coll made a noise with his mouth. "You heard what he said." "He said it every quarter for eleven years." "He says it to the ones with the short bands." "He says it to all of us. We're the only ones listening." They went back to the chute. Below them the flats ran out under the city in a long black seam, and the coal came up in a raw black gizzard that filled the air until you could taste it on your teeth. Ryam put his hands on the rail and let the cold come into his palms. His band was under his sleeve. It was always under his sleeve. You did not go to the yard or the market or the baths in Halbeck with your band showing unless you wanted to be asked what you were worth. They were still at the rail when the gate opened again and the man who came through it did not touch the coal dust off his coat, which Ryam understood at once to be a man from the House. Tall, late forties, narrow in the shoulders, with a chalked cuff and a pen held behind his ear as though the pen were the ordinary sort. The clerks off the street had cuffs that were chalked and pens that were not. This one had both. "Pellam," the man said. "Ryam Pellam." "Yes." "I'm Merek Coldspur. I keep the south desk." He looked down the chute at the pile of coal, and at the water stain on the rail, and at the band on Ryam's arm where the sleeve had ridden up under the work. "You were stamped LOW." "I was." "You'll want to know what you're paying and what you're getting. That's reasonable and nobody in that building will tell you, so I will." He took a folded card from his inside pocket and held it out. "Advancement to journeyman costs one third of the band you were born with. You were born with three thousand nine hundred. That is one thousand three hundred hours, and after today you will hold one thousand five hundred and sixty, and every one of them will still be on the band when you die, provided you stop paying for things you want." Coll made a small sound. "And what I get," Ryam said. "Your Hold, and your Read, and a rate of pay that lets you be idle without dying. You'll be allowed to work a ninth hour a day instead of four. You'll be allowed to carry what two prentices carry. You'll be able to look at a page and know that the second column is wrong." Coldspur put the card into his own pocket again. "That is the entire trade. There is no better offer elsewhere. There is only this offer, or no offer." The wind came off the flats and went through both of them. Ryam thought about Wenna's room and the nine hours a week and the sound she made when the doctor pressed her back down to the mattress. "Why me?" he said. "There are forty prentices off this walk." "You have three thousand nine hundred hours on you and you were born after the revision." Coldspur's mouth moved a little. "South-ward children are cheap in hours. It makes you cheap to advance and very easy to spend. You are the ninth best purchase on the list." That was a salesman's sentence and it was also true, and Ryam had learned early that in Halbeck the two facts are not different facts. He looked at Coll. Coll was watching the coal come up, and had put both hands in his pockets, and had gone the colour of the walls. "I'll sign," Ryam said. "Before the quarter turns." Coldspur nodded as if a scale had settled. "The south desk, second gallery, at the first bell. Bring your mother if you want the office to see what the hours are for. They find it steadying." He turned and went out through the gate, and the coal dust took a long time to settle back onto his coat. Coll found his voice at last. "You didn't ask what happens to the people who say no." "No," Ryam said. "I asked what happens to the people who say yes, and I got the same answer from a man who wrote it down." He worked the rest of the shift. At the sixth hour his hands had gone numb at the knuckles and the band had rubbed the sore place under it where the brass lifted the skin. He took his shirt off at the end and looked at it in the lamp. The skin under the band was pink all the way round, as it had been since he was four, and would be until he died or the band was cut past where the skin would close. Eighteen hours from then, the first bell would sound at the south desk of the Hourhouse, and he would be a journeyman. He told his mother on the way home. She asked him three times what the number was and three times what the pay was, and both questions were the same question. Eighteen hours. He lay on his pallet in the front room and listened to her turning over, and he began, without meaning to, to work out how many times she would turn over before the band ran out. ---